The effects of Trump’s tariffs will show up sporadically over an extended period of time, not all at once and not as soon as a month.

Axios published a story for which the accompanying post on X reads, “Hard data suggests tariff-driven inflation and recession fears may be overblown.” A cavalcade of tariff supporters have touted it to say those who opposed the tariffs were wrong and Trump was right.

A few things worth noting:

1. I can’t speak for other tariff opponents, but I put my expectations out there for anyone to see back in March. I said there would be a negligible effect on the inflation rate, so anyone pointing to inflation remaining basically the same isn’t scoring any points against me. I said there would be higher prices for the goods to which tariffs apply, and sure enough, companies have announced price increases, with Walmart being the latest major example. I said there would be a negative effect on GDP growth, and sure enough, the economy shrank slightly in the first quarter. I said there would be continued U.S. stock market underperformance compared to the rest of the world, and after a big dip and a recovery, the S&P 500 is at basically the same level today as it was when I wrote that post on March 3. My expectations seem to be holding up pretty well so far.
2. I also said there would be a negative effect on jobs numbers, and that hasn’t happened, but we also shouldn’t expect it to happen so soon. Companies don’t like laying off workers, and they try to avoid it if they can. They don’t want to make a long-term decision like letting a productive employee go based on tariff policies that have been flighty. So as the administration has waffled, altered, and delayed its tariff agenda, many companies are still in wait-and-see mode on workforce decisions.
3. Strong spending data in March and April is in part due to consumers and businesses stocking up on foreign goods or moving up purchases they were planning to make later in the year. Car companies and furniture companies, among others, have been aggressively marketing to urge customers to make big purchases now before prices go up. That is not proof that tariffs are working to bring prices down; it’s proof that people who are actually spending money, not just talking about trade in the abstract, believe prices will go up when tariffs come into effect.
4. After massive backlash, the Trump administration has delayed the bulk of its “liberation day” tariff agenda, so it should be expected that any negative effects are more muted than they would have been had the administration gone with the policy as originally announced. “We reduced the severity of the tariffs, and now the negative effects aren’t as bad!” is not an argument for tariffs.
5. It takes about a month for goods to transit the Pacific Ocean, and even longer for businesses to run down their inventories, which they have increased in anticipation of tariffs. Effects will show up sporadically over an extended period of time, not all at once and not as soon as a month.
6. There’s also the paradox of U.S. international trade, which is that it’s very large in absolute terms, but small as a share of the economy relative to other countries. The U.S. economy is one of the least trade-oriented in the world — among countries for which data are available, only Ethiopia and Sudan have lower trade intensities — but the U.S. economy is so large that its international trade is still worth about $7 trillion. To the extent the impacts of tariffs are muted, it is in part because the U.S. economy is services-oriented, which protectionists claim to despise, and domestically traded services are hardly affected by tariffs at all.

Anyone declaring victory on tariffs based on data from one month isn’t just counting their chickens before they’re hatched. They’re counting them before the hens have even finished laying their eggs.